Consumers don't need to react to remember

While the primary goal in online advertising is to elicit a measurable consumer response of some type, a new study has found that even consumers that don't interact with ads retain some level of detail.

by Helen Leggatt

Perhaps impressions are as important as click-through rates after all.

Chan Yun Yoo, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Journalism and Telecommunications, discovered that different types of memory come in to play when it comes to viewing online ads.

Yoo found that facts and information, such as product benefits and website addresses, are learned by a consumer’s conscious interaction with online ads. This he refers to as “explicit memory”.

But, even when an online ad isn’t consciously interacted with, Yoo found that consumers retained information subconsciously in their “implicit memory”.

Only when certain stimuli are triggered will a consumer recall information from their implicit memory. For instance, a consumer might find themselves drawn towards a brand of mobile phone they had not previously considered, or recall a family-deal when driving past a Burger King.

“Click-through rates, which represent the percentage of people who clicked on an ad after viewing it, might be useful to determine whether an ad elicited an immediate response,” writes Andrew Schrock of Technology Review. “But ad impressions - that is, the number of times an ad is displayed - might be a better measure of the impact required to build a brand image.”

Tags: ad impression, click-through rate, online advertising, response measurement

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